


Dispensable, Indefensible

by Zeebie



Category: The Queen's Thief - Megan Whalen Turner
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-03
Updated: 2018-08-03
Packaged: 2019-06-21 10:34:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,473
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15555846
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zeebie/pseuds/Zeebie
Summary: Relius considers his position.





	Dispensable, Indefensible

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Drag0nst0rm](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Drag0nst0rm/gifts).



            It was well known that Attolia’s Secretary of the Archives had expensive taste. Before the king had joined the court, no man had dressed with greater care. Even after the Eddisian’s arrival, there were still days when the Secretary came out on top.

            What was less known and often forgotten, lost in a decade of infighting and depositions, was that the elegant Secretary was a bastard son. Born and raised in the unique insecurity of that position, Relius had loathed the mercenary attitude his father took toward social connection. He found it dehumanizing and embarrassing, viewing other people solely as means to an end. As a youth, Relius had fancied that his impeccable manners would charm people to his side. Then, when his father had died, his father’s patron summarily turned him out onto the street. Relius quickly learned that manners meant nothing without wealth—or the appearance of wealth—to back up his word.

            In a matter of months he was reduced almost to his deathbed. The only room he could afford was in the poorest part of the coastal town where the sewers frequently clogged, and the rainy season had just begun. Damp air permeated everything. Relius trudged to the market every day through mud so foul he began to lose his sense of smell. A month in, he realized that it was not the stench that was numbing his nose: it was disease.

            He became wracked with coughs, shivers, and an aching head. His breath rattled in his chest as he hunched over a battered writing desk, scribing for illiterate petty criminals who wanted official backing for their threats. He became very good at forging signatures when his hands weren’t trembling.

            Late one afternoon, as he was beginning to give up on the day, a prior customer approached him.

            “What d’you mean with this shit?” the man growled, shoving the parchment into Relius’ chest.

            “What do _you_ mean?” wheezed Relius, fighting back the urge to cough.

            “I mean how does a physician’s license stop a man getting arrested for carrying hashish, you bastard!”

            That was hardly Relius’ fault. He had only written what the customer had wanted. “Sorry,” he said, but before he could continue with the half-formed response in his brain, the man shoved him again.

            “Sorry don’t cut it,” he snarled. “Your shit handiwork lost me a gold stater. How’re you gonna pay me back, huh?” He hit Relius again, a single hand in the center of his chest. Relius coughed and tried to drum up the reserves of his strength with anger.

            “It’s not my fault your goat-brained scheme didn’t work,” he countered. “You want me to make a different license? Fine.”

            “I don’t want some stinkin’ paper, I want my gold!” the man shouted. Relius finally, finally realized that the man was drunk. There was no reasoning with him. He was too weak to brawl, so while the man was still puffing himself up for battle, Relius spun on his heel and fled.

            “Hey!” came the furious shout behind him. He didn’t look back. He had maybe a minute of running before his lungs gave out; he had to find a place to hide.

            He skidded around a corner, bounced hard off a wall, then slid into an alleyway guarded by a trash heap. It smelled atrocious, bad enough that no human would ever think to enter. He crouched there, breathing through his mouth, and listened. Moist, muddy footsteps followed his trail around the corner and halted as if confused. Relius closed his eyes. He didn’t pray, didn’t think of anything. He simply closed his eyes and stilled himself, became just another bit of debris in the mud.

            Unfortunately, the footsteps approached him anyway. Before Relius could understand what that meant, much less reach for the slender knife stowed on his belt, a hand seized the back of his tunic and hauled him to his feet.

-

            The smell of Attolia’s prisons was remarkably close to the smell of that alley. Although the Secretary of the Archives had spent copious amounts of time in the cells, never before had he been left idle long enough to recognize it. Perhaps it was appropriate that only now did he realize the similarity, because the knowledge pounding against his aching head, both then and now, was also the same: _you_ _are going to die here_.

-

            When Relius had woken up in that same alley, he was confused. At first it was the simple confusion of waking in an unfamiliar place, but after dragging his memories back to the surface, it was confusion about waking up at all. His unsatisfied customer had not been gentle, and Relius had gone limp rather than attempting to fight back.

            His head hurt abominably, his ribs felt broken, and when he tried to take a deep breath, the movement triggered his cough and both head and ribs hurt even more. When the coughing spell ended, he did not get up. Instead, he let his limbs sink into the mud again and stared blankly at the wall in front of him. He was lying on his stomach with one arm pinned beneath him, and he was dimly aware that such a position should be uncomfortable, but his body was too concerned with other pains to bother with that one.

            He lay there waiting for death for an indefinite, seemingly infinite length of time. He had no way to tell time; the sky was overcast, and he was in the perpetual shadows of the surrounding buildings. There were sounds drifting in from the street, but they were nonsense, a jumbled buzzing in the back of his mind. He must have dozed fitfully at several points because he once came back to full consciousness when something was flung onto the trash heap and splattered across his face and neck.

            His stillness was such that vermin began to crawl over him. First, of course, had been the flies and other insects, but eventually a mouse scurried over his shoulder in search of food. Relius watched apathetically as the creature’s movement flickered in and out of his vision. For the first time since he had woken up in the alley, the single thought in his head changed. _You are going to die here. That mouse is going to survive._

            It didn’t seem fair. _Fair?_ Part of him laughed bitterly. Sure it’s fair. The mouse hadn’t given up; Relius had.  He was lying on the ground, waiting for starvation, dehydration, illness, or infection to claim him. He didn’t even have the self-preservation instincts of a mouse.

            A mouse doesn’t have to pay for lodging, he thought, or even food. The obvious counterpoint was that he also didn’t _have_ to pay for those things, but Relius had no talent for handiwork or husbandry. Of course, neither did a mouse. The mouse rummaged through the mud, seeking whatever food might be left over in the waste, no matter how repulsive. He closed his eyes again and inhaled, a slow, deliberate lungful of the stinking air.

Relius climbed to his feet. The mouse vanished in an instant, but he didn’t notice. Heaving himself upright was excruciating, and he immediately doubled over to wretch helplessly. When he was only coughing up spittle, he gingerly lifted his head. He leaned against the damp wall when his head began to spin, but he didn’t fall. Breathing hurt, but the salty air was cool. A sea breeze brushed past him, blowing away the stench of the city for just a moment. He began to walk.

-

            The Secretary remembered the emotion that had hauled him out of the alley. A combination of rage and desperate hunger, it had ruled his life after that day. Privately, he occasionally smiled that a mouse had made him into the man who became the Secretary of the Archives.

-

            Once he’d recovered, the first thing Relius had done was to find the man who had beaten him and trail him to a wine shop. When the man had gotten drunk enough to lose his memory, Relius dragged him into the street and robbed him of everything save his trousers. The next day, he vanished from his crowded apartment and appeared at the less crowded but no less dirty residence of a local smuggler. The smuggler’s agents often used him to forge their trade permits, and Relius had decided it was high time he benefit properly from the illegal trade.

When the old king died, Relius was still poor, but no longer destitute. He had information gleaned from private parties and private missives, enough to threaten some of the most powerful men in the kingdom, but he had limited means to leverage it without immediately losing his own life. He bided his time, listening with rapt attention as rumors of the king’s successor swirled through the air.

The king’s only remaining child, a daughter from his second wife, killed two suitors in one evening and ascended the throne in her own right. Relius became fascinated with her, studying her image on the newly minted coins he extorted from the baron, his father’s former employer. She didn’t _look_ like a murderer, but then, a coin was too small a space to render a detailed likeness.

            Popular gossip held that the queen was too inexperienced to have conceived the plan on her own, that the head of the palace guard had guided her. If so, he was a ruthless and brilliant man, flouting convention—and, many would argue, common decency—with the punishments the queen doled out to rebellious noblemen. Regardless of to whom the power truly belonged, when Relius learned that the queen would be visiting the baron’s villa on her first royal progress, he had to see her.

-

            “And who are you?” she had asked him, looking down from her horse.

            The coins had done her no justice, Relius thought. To be sure, they had described her jewelry and mode of dress well enough, but no artist could capture the bright intensity of her eyes. Relius stared back for a long moment, stunned by what he saw. The young queen, so much younger than he had realized, had certainly killed her husband herself. Girls her age were meant to be blushing and uncertain, wavering at the precipice of maturity and the comfortable innocence of childhood. The queen had the full cheeks, the smooth skin, fine hair of her youthful peers, but when she turned her eyes on him, he felt a chill run down his spine. The knowledge that she could not only have him in his grave at a word, but could enact any number of gruesome punishments on him first was fully present in her gaze.

            “No one, Your Majesty,” he said, bowing.

            “Surely you have a name,” she said.

            “Relius, Your Majesty.”

            “Who is your master, Relius?”

            “No one, Your Majesty.”

            “You serve yourself?” she asked, a wry smile playing on her lips.

            “I do, Your Majesty,” he said.

            She had raised an eyebrow and drawn a breath, perhaps to speak, but her guards had found his knives and thrown them to the ground. She glanced down at them.

            “And these?”

            “Not for throwing, Your Majesty,” her guard captain said, “and inconvenient from where he was hiding.”

            “Were you going to kill me, Relius?” the queen asked. She was not accusatory, merely curious.

            “No, Your Majesty,” he answered, bowing. “The knives are for self-defense. I only wanted a glimpse of your face.”

            The queen exhaled sharply through her nose. Relius realized it was a controlled laugh.

            “Well, you have glimpsed me. Be on your way, and don’t creep through my guards’ perimeter again,” she ordered.

            Relius bowed. Two guards held his arms as the queen wheeled her horse around to continue on her way.

            “Wait!” he cried. “Your Majesty, wait!”

            The queen looked over her shoulder. “What is it?”

            “I could serve you.”

-

            He didn’t regret it. His motivations had been selfish and his methods cruel, but in service to the queen, he felt justified. She too was furious. But if she raged against the barons who threatened her throne, it was only in part because she hated the slight to her authority. The abuses that the worst of the nobles perpetuated against her people enraged her too, and she seethed when reports of barons’ sons raping scullery maids came before her.

            “Your Majesty cannot surely be angry about everything, all the time,” an attendant once chided her in Relius’ hearing.

            The queen turned with venom in her eyes. “Can’t I?” she hissed.

            That woman was quickly assigned to another post.

            Relius had enjoyed palace life. The intrigue was stimulating and, once the queen’s coffers began to recover, rewarding. In his childhood, Relius had only ever been comfortably dressed. Living in the slums, he had worn absolutely anything that came to hand, and when he finally managed to secure some sort of income from the discovery and trade of secrets, he had needed the money for more pressing concerns.

When he first arrived at the palace, dressed in sturdy work clothes, he had had no idea of the fashions. Courtiers glanced at him from the corner of their eyes, snapping open fans and sniggering behind them. Luckily, Relius had always been a quick study, and before long, he had engaged a tailor to dress him in garments that proclaimed his power in no uncertain terms. The court quickly forgot his early blunders, too preoccupied with wondering where his power came from, and then too wise to challenge him once they knew. He was discrete in public, but there was no stopping the laundry maids from gossiping about the bloodstains.

-

            As the poets on the Peninsula said, “These violent delights have violent ends.” Relius had always known it; it was why he had first rejected his father’s manipulative philosophy. Use others and discard them, and one day you, too, will be discarded. But it had become the only way for him to survive, so he lay quietly in his cell, resting his injuries, waiting patiently for his queen to finish with him. She had watched the interrogations, he knew, but he had not looked for her. He had not seen her since his confession.

            The prison keeper’s mocking tones came slowly to his ear. Relius was confused; how could this man dare such arrogance in the face of his queen? Nonetheless, his chest seized with gratitude. If she deigned to come see him before his death, he would accept this visit as the last act of her kindness, so deeply buried by the requirements of her station.

Then he heard the king’s voice, and his heart sank. As much as his queen had ever burned with anger at the injustices done to her, he could only imagine the fury that motivated the king.


End file.
